Looking back at the Galaxy series, the main driver behind Android's success.

Over the last three years, Samsung has risen to become the unequivocal success story for the Android platform. Not only is it the only profitable manufacturer, but it has also spent the last couple of years striking more and more fear into the heart of its mobile arch nemesis, Apple.

As its competitors sprayed Android handsets over the retail scene like buckshot with micro-variations and diverse UI skins, Samsung quickly focused and put most of its effort into creating and promoting a flagship line of handsets. The company set aside support for increasingly niche features like hardware keyboards or confusing, subtle model tweaks in favor of focusing on one quality handset.

Now, the Samsung Galaxy line is unquestionably the most successful one in the history of Android. The most recent version, the Galaxy S III, even briefly displaced the iPhone as the top-selling smartphone for the third quarter of 2012, according to one source. Even Google is reportedly afraid of how successful Samsung has become with its mobile business.

Android smartphone market share (percent)

Q1

Q2

Q3

Q4

2010

9.6

17.2

25.3

30.5

2011

36.4

43.4

52.5

51.3

2012

56.1

64.1

72.4

69.7

On the eve of the launch of Samsung's fourth phone in the series, Ars decided to take a look back at the history of Samsung's Galaxy phones as a tribute to their success and the way they paved the road for Samsung, and by extension Android, to pose a real challenge—nay, a threat—to Apple and the dominance of the iPhone and iOS.

Galaxy S

When the Galaxy S debuted in June 2010, it was just one of an increasing number of phones available to the interested Android buyer. It tripped at the starting line by shipping with the "outdated" Android 2.1 Eclair rather than the 2.2 Froyo that was currently available. At the time, Ars noted that Samsung's track record with Android updates was "less than stellar."

The Samsung Galaxy S (Vibrant variation), the phone that started it all.

The Galaxy S was a learning experience for Samsung, and the company made what we know now to be typical freshman Android handset manufacturer mistakes. Samsung released different variants for each carrier: "Epic" for Sprint, "Fascinate" for Verizon, "Vibrant" for T-Mobile, "Captivate" for AT&T. Why any company ever started doing this, we cannot guess, as it's confusing and consumer-hostile. Our best theory is that it was at the carriers' insistence, to suggest to consumers that they each carried different and special products. The Epic even featured a slide-out QWERTY keyboard.

Still, the various phones (disguised with their carrier modifiers) got good reviews. The Galaxy S shipped 10 million handsets in six months and 24 million over the two years following its launch—not quite iPhone numbers, but nothing to sneeze at, especially for a single-model Android handset.

Following the Galaxy S, Samsung moved closer to Google and created the second Google partnership handset, the Nexus S. It looked like a cross between the Nexus One and Galaxy S and it was well received; the handset seemed to cement some kind of agreement between Google and Samsung for good treatment going forward.

Galaxy S II

Samsung's follow-up to the Galaxy S came just short of a year later in May 2011. This phone dispensed with the silly monikers and extra features present in the Galaxy S and instead focused on good, straightforward hardware, simple design, and Samsung's TouchWiz user interface. The screen and camera on the phone were both very impressive, and the phone felt incredibly fast running Android 2.3.4 Gingerbread. We were also very impressed with the software keyboard, which accommodated quick typing.

The big downside of the Galaxy S II for Americans was that it wasn't available on one of the two biggest cellular carriers in the country—Verizon customers were left in the lurch. Still, the Galaxy S II went on to be a smashing success, with five million shipped within the first three months of release and 10 million in five months. In just over a year, Samsung shipped 28 million units of the Galaxy S II.

The company managed to fix its issue with Android updates, promising Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich to Galaxy S II owners within three months of the OS version's release. By that time, the company had released a second Google flagship phone for Android 4.0, so keeping close to Google may have had the follow-on effect of allowing the company to get the update out faster to its other phones.

Galaxy Note

The 5.3-inch Galaxy Note, released in October 2011, never met the success of Samsung's Galaxy S line. However, it has carved out its own absurdly large-Android-phone niche. The format became so popular so quickly that many Android phone makers seemed to follow suit, giving their handsets bigger and bigger displays and blurring the line between "phone" and "tablet."

Samsung's original Galaxy Note. It's big.

Casey Johnston

Samsung shipped 5 million Notes in the first quarter of 2012 alone, and 7 million in the first 5 months. By mid August, 10 million Notes had been sold. Samsung had a secondary hit on its hands that it decided to continue to cultivate.

Samsung Galaxy S III

By the time this phone rolled around, Samsung had emerged as the powerhouse in the Android scene. In overall mobile phone sales during the third quarter of 2011, Samsung was outselling competitors Motorola, HTC, and RIM by more than seven to one. Android had gone from powering 20.5 million handsets sold in the third quarter of 2010 to 60.5 million during the same period in 2011.

The Android phone to beat: Samsung Galaxy S III.

Casey Johnston

When the Galaxy S III launched in May 2012, it made some ambitious reaches. S Voice was Samsung's attempt to compete with Apple's Siri, but it fell flat. TouchWiz took on a more nature-themed bent that featured water droplet and whistling sounds as alerts, which were a bit grating.

But the phone retained many of the things we loved about the S II: an excellent camera, good battery life, solid design, and robust internals. The US version was shorted the quad-core Exynos processor that appeared in European versions in favor of a dual-core Snapdragon S4, but the phone didn't suffer for it.

The Galaxy S III achieved Samsung's biggest sales numbers yet. 18 million were sold during the third quarter of 2012, when Samsung managed to best the sales of the most recent version of Apple's iPhone, the 4S (16.2 million) according to Strategy Analytics. Forty million of the handsets sold in the seven months following its release.

Galaxy Note II

The Samsung Galaxy Note II was released 11 months after its predecessor in September 2012. The Note II grew still bigger, to a diagonal screen size of 5.55 inches, it featured a 1.6GHz quad-core processor, and it was the first of Samsung's handsets to get Android 4.1 Jelly Bean.

In just two months, Samsung sold 5 million of the phones, styli and all.

The Galaxy Note II, which one-upped its predecessor in size.

Samsung

To infinity, or at least approaching it

Since Samsung's Galaxy S first became available back in 2010, the company has sold 100 million of the handsets as of January 2013. That's still not up to the success of the iPhone over the same period of time, as Samsung and Android got a relatively slow start (the iPhone first became available in 2007), but it's growing incredibly fast.

Enlarge/ Samsung only announces sales numbers at milestones and generally only for a single model, but we linearized Apple's iPhone sales announcements (which cover all models of iPhones) for comparison. Samsung went from putting up about a third of Apple's numbers with its Galaxy S to just under half of Apple's sales—and that's only counting a single Samsung model at a time.

iPhones were trouncing every Android phone out there in 2010, but now single Samsung handset models are getting closer to going head-to-head with the iPhone.

Ars will be present and liveblogging Samsung's Galaxy S IV announcement event at Radio City Music Hall in New York. Until then, we salute the Galaxy series and all that it has done for the Android platform.